Monthly Archives: October 2007

Well, I changed location–took a while, since I am on the bus–and figured I’d look up other users’ experiences with 10.5. Seems that a number of people have had issues with the initial blue screening after doing an upgrade. I didn’t have that problem, though that was because I chose to wipe my system entirely and start again. This has always been my preferred method of OS upgrade, and once again, easy with the Mac. It helps, I am sure, that I’ve not had this computer long enough to overworry about stuff on it, and have tried to be good about offline storage, online storage and redundancy. I had two portable hard drives die on me in a short span–I forgot about the inherent unreliability of laptop hard drives–and so I use a (hopefully) more robust solution. As I mentioned before, TimeMachine has the potential to be the coolest OS component since, say QuickTime–before the goofy brushed metal interface.

I am at Bookmans on Speedway at the moment, and have a straight-on view to the Porno armoire. There is a guy a-peeking in there. the word for the day is *queasy.* This is the feeling I have about the idea of looking in that chest of sin at cast-aside fapping material. Ugh.

So. I took the plunge last night and bought Leopard. Not *exactly* on opening day but close enough to be a drooling fanboy, I guess.

So everything is pretty well loaded up now and I am using it at Borders. woo hoo.

What do I think? (reminded of the Rock: IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT YOU THINK!)

— I like the new Sidebar feature. I also like the translucent menu bar. I am a sucker for incremental interface improvements. It lets my pretty blossom wallpaper (heisted from a Japanese verson of Win95) shine through kinda.

— I don’t have a high-capacity hard drive to sacrifice the the Time Machine, so you’ll have to look to someone else for wisdom on that. It is probably the best operating system component ever devised. Free. Out of the box. As I transition into this machine more and more everyday, I will probably use it.

— The Downloads stack is pretty cool–mainly because I don’t have a lot of clutter to deal with. I thought the fellow in the Leopard tour was a bit smarmy about clean desktops, but then, he looked a bit put-together to me anyhow.

— The animations in the Dock can be toned down nicely now, which wasn’t the case in earlier versions, that I could tell. If I want the stupid magnification effect turned off on the Dock, I can, and still be greeted with the application names so I know what I am hitting.

— UNIX compliancy isn’t going to change my world, since most places I’ve worked weren’t enlightened enough to use anything but Microsoft technology for their servers. However, the fact that Leopard *is* actually UNIX compliant (or POSIX, whatever) is good. Very good.

— The last couple times I attempted restart, it didn’t. It just sat there. I had to hit the power button. Meh–I restarted maybe once every other week with Tiger, once it was set up.

Offhand though, I still had to load Camino, as Safari still doesn’t do all the nifty things that any Mozilla browser can.

It’s approaching late October. Aaaaaannd back in Massachusetts,the leaves would either *have* changed or be ablout to change. the transition toward Winter would be a lot more obvious than it is here in Tucson. Here, it just gets cooler at night (not legitimately cold, of course, not yet anyway…). Looking outside right now, it looks about the same now as it did in March and in July.

That all being said, I do NOT miss the change of seasons. The coming cold and the leaves changing are not romantic to me. If anything they are sources of depression. Especially since we have no fall festival ingrained in the culture. Hallowe’en? Fuck you. Whatever interesting mysteries offered by Samhain have been stripped away by Christianity (love Jesus, HATE Christians). The rest have been blunted by our material culture. And even that is being eroded away by Political Correctness.

History will say, by the way, that the American Experiment creates a culture of babies and hand-wringing women. Thankyewww…